Replacing Religious Morality

[henryp]

You gave up on this belief not only because it contradicts your rationality but also because it contradicts your morality. So, as you see, morality is always there to the extent that it is stronger and deeper than religion.

OK, after you had lost your supposed theoretical source of morals (God), Were you able to steal or kill?? In this topic you don't, in fact, look for morals motivations but for morals justifications and interpretations.

1) God chose to create people he says would be better off never having been created.

That's not a moral judgement. It's a logical paradox. I like to think I'm being objective. It's the kind of thing you can draw up with if A then B, and whatnot.

2) While God is the justification for my morality, God is far from the only source of my behavioral conditioning. Society, parents, teachers, evolution, genetic predispositions, and a wide variety of other things.

The catch of course, is that God has a genuine claim to authority over my behavior. The rest of those things are just conditioning that has been bludgeoned into our heads since we were 2. That's where stepping back and attempting to be objective comes in.

Murder-who knows? Society covered that one with jail. In that I really don't want to go. Stealing-again jail has it covered pretty good. Although, in scenarios where I'm not in danger of repercussions, illegal streaming and downloading being the easy example, I gladly participate.

But to go from decades of being taught one thing, to completely about facing, particularly while living in a society that still is pushing that idea is going to be tough. Take us out of our comfort zone, maybe things change. It's not a mistake poor people are much bigger on stealing and murdering eachother. Or that powerful people use stealing and murdering to maintain their power. But a middle class american with a mortgage and family, Murder and serious theft carry to many practical consequences for me to consider it.

But what about things with no practical consequences!? The biggest change I've been able to enact, is that I no longer care about people I'm not invested in. I've always been empathetic, in that I'm good at understanding what other people are going through. But I'm no longer sympathetic. I know it's terrible for the people in the Philippines to be smashed to bits by a typhoon, but I have no qualms about doing absolutely nothing to help them, because I just don't care if they live, die, or suffer.

Maybe I'm just a crazy sociopath. But when you look around the world, at the behaviors of people, I think that perhaps that's what most people are, and society/evolution/tradition has worked very hard into tricking them into believing they are not/shouldn't want to be one.


tldr: I'm trying to be objective. I no longer operate based on "Morality." I now operate based on practicalities and maximizing my own personal interests. I don't do things because I think they are 'good' as an absolute, but because they are objectively positive in regards to my own interests.